Building PDP-11 Boot Tapes

From: Pat Barron <pat_at_transarc.ibm.com>
Date: Wed May 17 14:46:33 2000

On Wed, 17 May 2000, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> OK, I'm feeling lazy. Is it possible to build a PDP-11 TK-50 Boot tape
> under OpenVMS V7.2?
>
> What can I say, I really don't feel like getting my DECstation 5000/133
> fully up and running with NetBSD, moving the TZ30 from my PDP-11/73 to the
> DECstation, making the tape, then moving the TZ30 back just to build a tape.

Sure - there is definitely a way to take your raw data and dump it out to
an unlabelled tape. But it's been so long since I've used VMS, that I
don't remember what that way is. However, see comments below ...

> Hmm, maybe I should just use an emulator to build UNIX V7M RL02 images for
> my /44 and then use a VAX to make the diskpacks :^)

If that is an option for you, you should do that. The bootstrap and
standalone utilities only support TU10/TU16, TE16, and TS11 tape drives;
there is no TMSCP support at all in V7m. If you key in a TMSCP bootstrap
by hand, you'll probably be able to read in the bootstrap and get to the

     Boot
     :

prompt, but you won't be able to do anything after that, since boot won't
load anything from a TMSCP tape.....

--Pat.
Received on Wed May 17 2000 - 14:46:33 BST